In 2008 I bought a gaming laptop from the Alienware website, after tax and shipping it came to just over $5,000. I justified the cost of this purchase saying that such a high performance machine would stay viable for longer, as opposed to buying a new laptop every 2-3 years in order to keep up with new advances in gaming technology.
When I bought the laptop I opted for the 4GB Ram option. Once I received my laptop, on inspection I found that it could only use 2.8GB of Ram. I was assured by Alienware at the time that this was due to me running a 32-bit operating system.
However, when I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit I found that I was still limited to 2.8GB of Ram. I tried to call Alienware and after being on hold for 45 minutes on many occassions came to the realistion that they were no longer answering their cusomter service line.
I did some research online and found that the problem (model M9750) was that the chipset used by Alienware on my laptop was limited to 2.8GB of ram. The only solution to this would be for Alienware to realease a new BIOS for the chip, which they refuse to do.
I am willing to accept that a laptop has a finite lifespan in regards to performance, but the one thing that SHOULD be upgradable on a laptop is the ram. I was sold a laptop with 4GB installed that WAS NEVER going to utilise that ram, and when I enquired about it was LIED to.
I recently tried to play Witcher 2 and my $5,000 laptop cannot handle it after 3 years, not due to any other reason than Alienware put a "Volkswagen" engine in my "Ferrari".
This is fraud and a rip-off.
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